Sony looks to shake up SSD arena with new 240GB and 480GB drives
These will be the first models released outside of Japan
Sony is putting out a range of consumer SSDs – brace yourselves for the SLW-M series.
As TechPowerup, which spotted the development, notes, Sony has been producing solid-state drives for the Japanese market previously, but these units will get an international rollout.
The SSDs are 2.5-inch drives supporting SATA 3.0 and will initially come in two sizes – 240GB and 480GB, apparently using Toshiba A19 TLC NAND flash. Presumably, larger capacity models may follow at some point.
As for performance, you can expect (up to) 560MB/s for sequential reads and 530MB/s in terms of writes.
It's said that the drives will feature a Phison S10 series controller. They will also come bundled with cloning software (Acronis True Image 2015 HD) and Sony's own SSD ToolBox to help monitor and keep an eye on your drive's health.
It'll be interesting to see how Sony prices these offerings, and with another player active in the global SSD market, with any luck we might see an extra edge of competitiveness in terms of pricing.
Other recent news on the Sony front included a rumour that the firm was pulling out of the tablet market – but by all accounts, that turned out to be false. Of course, the company did drop out of laptops a couple of years back, although its Vaio brand (which was sold off) is still going as a standalone company.
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).